Project at a Glance
| Facility Size | 1,000,000+ sq ft |
| Daily Output | 1,000+ 1U servers, rails, and power cords |
| Weight Moved Per Day | 40,000+ lbs |
| Crew Size | 4-5 TAMS technicians |
| Compliance Scope | EPA e-waste regulations, full chain of custody |
| Asset Recovery | 10-15% above standard market returns |
| Result | Every deadline met. No compliance violations. No data breaches. |
The Challenge
When the client first walked the floor of this facility, they were looking at roughly 17 football fields of live data center infrastructure, packed floor to ceiling with racks, servers, rails, power cords, and the kind of hardware density that makes a facilities team go quiet.
This wasn’t a data center decommissioning project you could muscle through with a standard crew and a calendar. The volume was staggering, 40,000 pounds of equipment per day needing to be carefully removed, inventoried, and processed in full compliance with EPA e-waste regulations. Every asset had a paper trail requirement. Every data-bearing device had a destruction standard attached to it. At this scale, the complexity compounds fast.
The client had a contract date driving the timeline, and the financial penalties for missing it were real. But the bigger operational challenge was finding a partner who had actually done something like this before, one with the certifications, the crew discipline, and the process depth to work through a facility this large without the wheels coming off somewhere in the middle.
The Approach
With a crew of four to five technicians, we moved 40,000 pounds of hardware per day. That breaks down to 1,000 1U servers, plus rails and power cords, stripped, inventoried, and ready for processing before anyone packed up for the night.
The logistics would bog down most teams. We’ve been running projects at this scale for over two decades, and it shows in how our crew carries the pace without letting documentation fall behind. Methodical, disciplined, and not easily rattled by a big footprint.
Every asset was tracked from the moment it left the rack. Serialized reporting and chain-of-custody documentation gave the client a real-time picture of what was removed, how it was handled, and where it was going. Nothing disappeared into a gray area.
Our certifications, including SERI R2v3, ISO 14001, and NAID AAA, aren’t decorative. They’re the operational framework that kept every piece of hardware on the right side of EPA e-waste requirements, from the first day on site through final clearance.
For hardware with remaining market value, we tapped our network of vetted buyers. Recovery returns came in 10-15% above standard market rates, a meaningful offset to the overall project cost.
The Results
We cleared the facility on time, in full compliance, and without a single gap in the chain of custody across the entire operation. For a project running at 40,000 pounds of hardware per day, that’s not a given.
Every asset was tracked from removal to final destination. EPA e-waste compliance held throughout the project with no violations. Data-bearing devices were processed to NIST-800-88 standards, and the security record came through clean. Asset recovery returns came in 10-15% above standard market rates. And when the contract date arrived, the facility was cleared, documented, and ready to hand over.
We’ve been doing this since 2003. The ability to absorb a project this large without losing precision along the way isn’t incidental. It’s what two decades of enterprise decommissioning look like in practice.
Why TAMS
Most decommissioning vendors can manage a contained project. Handling a hyperscale facility on a hard deadline, with a lean crew and full compliance requirements running in parallel, is a different discipline entirely. That’s where our track record gets built.
TAMS Solutions holds certifications across R2v3, NAID AAA, ISO 9001, 14001, and 45001, along with NIST-800-88 data destruction standards. Enterprise clients in Virginia, Texas, and the Pacific Northwest keep coming back because that coverage holds up when the compliance stakes are real.
Whether you’re clearing a single floor or a full campus, we bring the experience and the process to hand you back a site you can sign off on without hesitation.
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